I think suppressing the use of the expression "Inshallah" is more about the erasure of a distinct ethnic identity than it is about promoting atheism. Probably true, although it can be two things - and given how much Xi Jinping's government is leaning into the Make Red China Great Again ph...

China's Communist government isn't too keen on Christianity, either It seems they're equal opportunity then. Why isn't this in the news? Because China has way more financial pull than even the largest religious organizations. Plus, as Soupspoon says, in a way it's old news. The western world decide...

So how it stands now is that the ZIP file has been extracted as-is to a directory on my storage partition, from which I've been trying to run the executable. (I tried moving it to a location in the WINE main path, but this didn't change anything.) I've tried launching it directly from the file manag...

Intriguing description, and I'd love to give it a try, but when launched under WINE it complains that it can't open the equipment or monster files. Looking at the filenames, which exhibit a smattering of different approaches to capitalization, I suspect it's probably tripping up on case-sensitivity ...

Argh, why does C++ not zero out memory in edge cases? Just because my class/struct doesn't have an explicit constructor and is a local variable (of the main function for crying out loud) shouldn't be a reason to leave junk in there. Perhaps the most ridiculous part of this behaviour is that an init...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/feathered_dinosaur_venn_diagram.png Title text: My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels. This comic ne...

Unlike films, tv shows don't age well. I disagree - it's still a fine show. But yes, it is less commonly-known outside the UK, even more so now that it's been off the air for over fifty years (though the immensely-quotable opening exchange seems to have spread more pervasively than the show itself....

Oh, that's easy. 1984 is tonally consistent throughout and its ending, as bleak as it is, is entirely in keeping with the rest of the book. Old Yeller on the other hand is a textbook example of juvenile fiction that reads perfectly normally for most of its length before suddenly going out of its way...

(Some might object that felons can't be any of the above. Easily overcome: "Pardon.") That'd actually be interesting (and by "interesting" I mean "horrifying") to test, considering that it was just established last year in the Arpaio case that a pardon does not invalid...

The Lion King is no different from any other Disney princess movie, in terms of promoting the idea that it's no accident that some people are born into positions of power and privilege, and others are not. Counterpoints: Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. (Also, sorta-kinda The Sword in the Stone , ...

(Spoiler: it's a '90s kids movie, they wanted to sound deep but didn't feel the need to actually put any thought into it. This is not to say that analyzing kids' movies from a moral/philosophical standpoint is pointless in the general sense, but: you can't find what ain't there.)

* Background : Played it as a child on a PC * System : DOS or Windows 3.1 * Year : Around 1992, i think it was before we got an Intel i486 but i`m not sure. * Perspective : 2d with a view from the top * Gameplay : The main task was to collect keys. You were walking through levels and had to solve t...

Meh, literature awards have nothing to do with how entertaining the story is and everything to do with whatever the literary critics consider to be “high art”. Nailed it. I'm always a little comforted to be reminded that I was not the only child to be variously baffled, depressed, and/or pissed off...

Also, how did no one realize this movie made absolutely no sense at any point while they were making it? And not even in that kind of coherent 'the creators were clearly trying to say something but it just didn't quite come across' way that the end of 'The Prisoner' doesn't make any sense, or the c...

America is a country where the normal serving size for beer is neither one glass nor one bottle, but rather the pack of bottles in which they are sold. Drinking six to twelve bottles or tins at once is quite common among enthusiasts. But it is American beer and thus your 'enthusiasts' are mere amat...

Are these oz as in 1/16lb, or floz? And are floz standardized between US and imperial systems? (e.g. is a US pint exactly 4/5ths an imperial pint?) Fluid ounces. And I hadn't even considered that - devilishly enough, even that measure is slightly different. According to Wikipedia, an imperial fluid...

Ironically, pints are one unit of measurement us yanks don't much bother with. The standard unit of measurement for beer in America is the beer. Yes and no. You buy beer at the store in discrete units (or packs thereof,) which are usually 12 oz., but may be a US pint (16 oz.) or a larger semi-stand...

You know, I read all that and was like "eh, fairly typical crazy-person manifesto stuff." Then I opened the article and found out that the guy is actually a member of the Washington state legislature. That's, uh, interesting.

This is a valid perspective - but, while it may be that correctly mimicking the properties of low-quality live poultry means a correct and satisfactory chicken emulation, it could alternatively be that this one particular corner case happens to line up while other results are more out of kilter. We ...

I mean, yeah, there was really no good outcome here and the entire fiasco is an excellent example of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. But then, freedom of speech (and, accordingly, the principle that nobody gets to make you say something you disagree with ) is the absolute number-one bedrock foundatio...

Well, where is the line between 'performance art' and 'publicity stunt' anyhow? Surely any performance art that goes sufficiently well will get labelled as a publicity stunt by some... This. It's like the Poe's Law of art. Some day someone will do an extensive writeup on a brilliant new exhibit at ...

Occasionally, I've thought back to a book I started reading ages ago as a kid, and probably never finished. I don't know why, but if it's going to keep popping up in my head, I'd feel better if I at least knew what it was. Since I'm basically working off of historical guesswork, I can't be too sure...

I'd love to know if there is an answer to this question, but in my experience on basically every version of Windows from XP onward, getting the system to actually recognize a change in the user's profile folder apparently involves making a sacrifice to the Elder Gods or something.